IGHC Research Seminar Series

Race, Refugees and the Current Crisis

In the years during and following the Cambodian genocide, hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees were resettled in the US. In the 1980s and 1990s, ten thousand of these refugees arrived in the Bronx, New York City, where they became neighbors with African Americans and Latinos who were living through a “war” of their own – the urban crisis. In his book, Unsettled, Eric Tang tells the story of this refugee community’s survival and resistance amid the concentrated poverty of the Bronx. The challenges are ongoing, compounded today by resurgent nationalisms across the globe that vilifies refugees and other migrants. Refugee resettlement numbers in the United States are now at a historic low. In his keynote address Tang, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, explores how we continue to build refugee resistances in this climate of reaction.

About the Speaker

Eric Tang is an Associate Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and incoming Director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a courtesy appointment in Sociology. A former community organizer, Tang has published numerous essays on race and urban social movements, including award-winning writing on post-Katrina New Orleans. His most commentaries on racial justice have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation. Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto is his first book.